Humans have questioned “Who Am I” as far back in our history as we first discovered we had a navel and could gaze upon it. Since then, the philosophers and prognosticators and teen-agers everywhere have come to one and only one conclusion:
Do define myself by my relationships? By my likes and dislikes? By the number of followers I have on TikTok (don’t even have an account)? By my past? Future? Hopes? Fears? By my employment? By my religion?
The past couple of months I have found myself adrift in a very strange place: one without my computer. It was crashing like a lead-footed blind man at Daytona! I thought it was a virus, then maybe a windows update snafu, then maybe a windows defender snafu (windows has a lot of snafu’s). I thought maybe I had a adblock issue, then a competing issue with my security software. I couldn’t go on line at all or the computer would crash. I struggled with it for a couple of months until I finally gave up and did a full factory image wipe. And, let’s be clear, I’m not Scottie. When I do a wipe I may as well have taken a sledgehammer to it because whatever that computer was is gone.
There went my favorite websites. My ways of spending time not working – even when I should have been working – were gone. I mean, who remembers all their passwords!?! I’ve got sites I’ve been going to for years that I put on a ridiculous password and saved it on the computer to never bother remembering it again. And they were all gone. I mean, what the hell am I supposed to do with my time now! I can’t tell you how stressful this was, and how dumb I felt feeling stressed about it.
So, I started reading more, and I mean a lot more. I went on a diet. I had a lot of work going on at my parent’s place and I started taking care of my own better. I cleaned my kitchen every day, my bathroom 3-times a week, kept caught up on laundry and even sorted through some of the junk I’ve allowed to pile up. I mowed the lawn and got rid of a pile of downed branches I had reserved for “later” (I have a lot of those “later” things – stuff I’ll take care of, ya know, … later). I didn’t even come into my office anymore. I was actually eating at the diningroom table! I know – sacrilege!
So, on Tuesday I began the work of putting this computer back together again, of re-establishing my very identity. Now, today, as I write this it’s Friday, the sink is full, laundry on the floor, dirty towels in the bathroom, I have a dirty plate and cup of cold coffee stagnating on my desk that I keep bumping with my elbow and somehow my life is now “right”. Truly, I found how the other folks live and I didn’t like it!
One thing I did also learn in all of this: I restarted Google and when I signed in I was presented with a number of bookmarked sites that I haven’t seen in years. A good third of them didn’t even exist anymore. Folks, let me tell you – Google Never Forgets! But, it’s nice to visit who I used to be 🙂
Hugs
-randy
Scottie's Playtime 
One of my absolute favorite xkcd comics on this very subject:
also backup, backup, backup!
I’m in the Apple Ecosystem so I take advantage of icloud password storage, all my bookmarks are on every device I use, have a dropbox account that contains a backup of critical information stored as plain text, a OneDrive account with a similar copy, time machine backups of the main computers.
Kinda paranoid about data loss, but like every photograph we’ve taken since about 1996 a digital image only, and that all is irreplaceable, much of our official life stuff exists only in electronic form, etc. All this is way too important to exist only on one computer!
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